


Another Teenage Runaway

by listerinezero



Series: 1973 [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Domestic, Established Relationship, M/M, Mansion Fic, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 15:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/listerinezero/pseuds/listerinezero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new student arrives at The Xavier-Lehnsherr Academy and makes a bad first impression on Erik.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Teenage Runaway

**Author's Note:**

> This is a remix of the first chapter of "The Xavier-Lehnsherr Academy: 1973." Yes, I'm remixing my own fic. That's allowed, right? If not, it was unforgotten's idea. ;)

Erik couldn’t sleep. It was a quarter after midnight and still eighty-seven degrees outside, and the bowl of ice he’d set in front of the fan near the window was doing nothing to make his and Charles’ bedroom any less stifling. The air felt like soup, and the bedcovers were damp with sweat. It was disgusting.

Making matters worse, he’d had a throbbing, pounding headache for the past two hours, and the pills he’d taken had barely made a dent. He’d chugged down two glasses of cold water with the medication, which did nothing but make him sweat more.

In spite of all that, he might have been able to sleep through it if only he could have cleared his mind, but no - they had fifteen new students arriving in less than a week, and with each passing minute he thought of another chore he needed to do to prepare. Not that he wouldn’t have found something to worry about anyway. He always did. Bills, exams, Charles’ health, whether or not Charles would leave him over the last stunt he’d pulled, planning his next stunt, the state of mutant affairs in this country, the next election, the homeless, the destruction of the rainforest. The students. Always the students.

Beside him, Charles shifted and snored. The tranquilizers he took to sleep in a school full of noisy minds also let him sleep through the heatwave undisturbed. Usually, Erik hated that Charles took such heavy sleeping pills because it interfered with their sex life. Now he was just jealous.

When Charles had first gotten out of the hospital ten years earlier, and the elevator was completed, Erik had liked the idea of them taking the master bedroom on the top floor. Of course, the idea that heat rises is a lot more appealing in February than in August.

After another twenty minutes of tossing and turning, Erik gave up, grabbed his pillow, and headed downstairs. Maybe it would be cooler in the living room. Maybe he’d sleep outside on a lawn chair. Hell, at that point he’d sleep on the tile floor in the kitchen if it meant he’d get some relief from the heat.

That was when the doorbell rang.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, threw his pillow onto the living room couch, and turned back towards the front door. He was expecting it to be Sean, probably too stoned to work his keys. Or some students pulling a prank (and when they saw Erik interrupting it, furious, in his boxers, red-eyed and sweating like a pig, they’d never pull a prank again).

Instead it was two people he’d never seen before: a rosy-cheeked teenage boy and a very angry looking older man, holding onto the boy’s skinny upper arm tightly enough to turn his already pale skin white.

“This kid one of yours?” the man asked.

“Depends,” said Erik. “What’d he do?”

“Listen, pal. I drove all the way up here from LaGuardia and he thinks he’s going to pay me with a magic trick. Now, I don’t know if this place is a school or some kind of asylum, but I’m not leaving here without getting paid. With money, you got me? Or I’ll call the police!”

A magic trick. The boy was a mutant. Erik noticed then that the car behind them with its lights on was a taxi, and realized the flush in the boy’s cheeks wasn’t from the heat - it was from frustration and embarrassment.

“Yeah, I got you,” Erik sighed. “Hang on, let me get my wallet. You can come in.”

The boy started to step into the house, but the man pulled him back out. “No way. Nobody’s going anywhere until I get my money.”

“You’ll get your money, all right? Two minutes,” Erik told him, and went back upstairs.

This wasn’t the first time they’d had a young mutant runaway turn up on their doorstep. As soon as they went public, kids started knocking on their door, coming from as far away as Johannesburg and as near as Scarsdale. There were very few things that Erik would wake Charles for - he had a hard enough time sleeping without Erik getting him up for every little thing - and another teenage runaway was not one of them. So he was in and out of the bedroom quickly, grabbing his wallet off the dresser in silence, careful not to wake Charles.

Back at the front door, the cabbie was still holding onto the boy, whose expression now looked more annoyed than embarrassed.

“Here,” Erik said, handing him all the cash he had. “Keep the change.”

The man looked disappointed to leave without a fight, but he let go of the boy’s arm without further struggle and returned to his cab, counting his money and muttering to himself the whole way. Erik waited until he drove off, then invited the boy inside.

“You know,” Erik said as he shut the front door behind him, “there are plenty of pay phones at the airport. You could have called us and we would have come and picked you up. You might have had to ride in a car with Banshee for an hour, but it’s a lot cheaper than a cab.”

The boy didn’t smile. His jaw was set and his brown eyes were darting around the house nervously.

“You offered the cab driver a magic trick,” said Erik. “Can I see it?”

“I need to speak to Charles Xavier,” the boy said. “His accent was unusual; Erik couldn’t place it.

“He’s asleep.”

“Then wake him.”

At noon, Erik might have gotten a kick out of the boy’s cheek. At 1am, it annoyed him. “Middle-of-the-night runaways are my department, not his. If you don’t want to demonstrate your mutation, that’s fine. Just tell me a little about yourself and what brings you here at one o’clock in the morning, and I’ll get you set up in a room for the night, okay?”

“I’m here to speak to Charles Xavier. I need you to go get him.”

Erik had been giving this boy the benefit of the doubt, but he was already beginning to lose his patience. He was awfully arrogant for a scrawny fifteen-year-old, and rude to boot. If Erik had spoken to an adult that way when he was a kid - an adult he’d never met, who’d just done him a favor - his father would have smacked him.

“No,” Erik said. “When you show up at my house in the middle of the night, you don’t get to tell me what to do. You tell me what you’re doing here and why I just gave all my money to pay for your cab, and then maybe I’ll let you speak to Charles in the morning, understand?”

The boy rolled his eyes, which Erik found irritating, but at least he didn’t talk back this time.

“What’s your name?” asked Erik.

“David.”

“Where are you from?”

“Israel. And Paris.”

Erik stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, David. I’m Professor Lehnsherr. Now, are you going to show me your magic trick?”

David shook his hand, and, looking directly into Erik’s eyes, said, “I need to speak to Charles Xavier.”

Erik felt it then: a push against his mind. _Go get him go get him go get him_.

“Was that you?” Erik asked, pointing to his own head, which was now throbbing even more painfully from the intrusion. “Are you trying to manipulate me?”

David jumped, startled, obviously not expecting Erik to have picked up on his telepathy.

“What did I just tell you?” Erik’s voice was beginning to raise. “I said you’re not going to speak to Charles tonight, and now you’re trying to trick me into it?”

“I was just--”

“You were just what? Showing me what you can do? By trying to get me to do something I didn’t want to do without my knowing it? And you expect me to do you favors?”

“I’m sorry, I just… I need to speak to Charles Xavier.”

“And I told you, you’re not going to speak to him tonight. I’ll let him know you’re here in the morning. I’ll let him know you’re a telepath who manipulated a cab driver into taking you all the way up here without the money to pay him, that you were rude to me, and that you tried to use your telepathy on me to wake him up in the middle of the night for God-knows-what reason. And then he can decide whether or not he’ll speak to you. Understand?”

The boy was blushing again. Good, Erik thought. He should feel bad about the way he behaved.

“I said, do you understand?” Erik repeated.

“I understand.”

“Good,” said Erik. “Grab your things. I’ll find you a room for the night. We can decide what we’ll do with you in the morning.”

But before David could pick his duffel bag up off the floor, the elevator bell rang. Charles must have woken up.

 _Go back to bed, Charles_ , Erik thought as loudly as he could. _This kid’s a little brat. Don’t give him the satisfaction_. When he got no response, Erik added angrily, _You’re undermining me if you come talk to this kid! He’ll never take me seriously, and he’ll think he can get away with anything he wants!_

But the elevator doors opened and Charles emerged anyway, actively ignoring Erik’s pleas to go back to bed. His eyes were only on David as he moved his chair across the floor towards them.

“Charles,” Erik started to say, but Charles was focused on David.

It was always strange when Charles met another telepath; there were layers of conversation that Erik could not ever hope to grasp. Charles and David’s faces were both cycling through expressions, reacting to a dialogue Erik couldn’t hear, and as always, it made Erik a little bit jealous.

After a moment, Charles’ eyes began to well with tears. “You look like me,” he said through a sob.

He did, actually, now that Charles mentioned it. David’s nose was a little different, and his eyes were brown, but they had the same face. David’s hair was straighter than Charles’, and it was longer, now that Charles had finally given into Erik’s years of begging and cut his hair. David was a couple of inches taller than Charles was, and thanks to the upper body strength Charles had gained over the past ten years, David looked lanky by comparison. But as they regarded each other, they both broke into the same smile.

Erik looked back and forth between them. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked. “Do you know this kid?”

“I’ve never seen him before in my life.” Charles looked up at Erik, brushing a tear from his cheek. “He’s my son.”

“He’s your what?”

“Are you sure?” David asked carefully. “I thought so, but...”

Charles was trying to stop himself from crying and not succeeding. “I’m sure,” he nodded. “Your mother was Gabrielle?”

David nodded, stiff with shock.

“I didn’t know she’d died. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Despite the tears, Charles was handling this surprise pretty well. Meanwhile, Erik was stunned, and David looked as though he might keel over.

“Sit down!” Charles insisted, leading David into the living room. “Do you want something to eat? Or drink? Do you need anything?”

When they reached the couch, Charles paused and turned to Erik. “Darling, is this your pillow? What's it doing down here?”

David’s eyes shot to Erik. Telepath or not, he would have noticed that wasn’t how colleagues normally spoke to each other.

“It was too hot in the bedroom and I have a headache, so I was going to sleep on the couch.”

“Oh.” Erik felt Charles gently inspecting his headache while David watched, suspicion in his eyes. “Well, I can fix one of those things,” Charles said as he raised his fingers to his forehead, closed his eyes, and eased away Erik’s headache, leaving only relief and affection behind.

“Thank you,” Erik sighed.

“You should have woken me,” Charles said. Even as he was speaking to Erik, he couldn’t stop looking at David, a dizzy smile on his face. “You would have woken me anyway if you were tossing and turning all night.” He reached for Erik’s hand and gave it an excited squeeze.

For a moment it felt like the entire room flushed cold. If David suspected a minute ago, now he knew, and with his telepathy untrained, he was telling the entire house exactly how he felt about it.

“I think I’d like to stay up and talk to David a while,” said Charles. “Why don’t you see if you can get some sleep?”

David was glaring at Erik, really and truly glaring at him, and Erik glared right back. He and Charles had been together for eleven years, and not once had he felt he needed to apologize for their relationship, to any one of the mutants who lived under their roof, and he wasn’t about to start now. But this wasn’t just some student; this was Charles’ son. And Charles’ son hated him.

 _He’s just surprised, love_ , Charles’ voice returned to Erik’s mind. _He’s only known us for five minutes. Give him a chance._

Part of Erik wanted to stay there to defend himself, but now was not the time. “Don’t stay up too late,” Erik said to Charles, and leaned down to kiss him goodnight while David looked on, eyes wide. “Nice meeting you, David. I suppose I’ll see you in the morning.”

David said nothing, but Erik could feel his loathing swell like a rising tide as Erik picked up his pillow, pushing him back up the stairs.

 _All kids hate their stepparents at first_ , Erik told himself as he replaced the sweaty bedsheets with fresh ones from the linen closet. Any kid would feel shocked to meet their long-lost father and discover that he was sleeping with another man.

But this kid could project that hatred. And this kid was already trouble before Erik knew who he was. This was only the beginning.

 _Charles is going to love him_ , Erik thought miserably as he climbed back into bed. _And he is going to love Charles, and he is going to hate me because I am the evil stepfather, and Charles is going to side with him every time because he’s his son, and Charles is going to leave me and everything is going to fall apart._

Forget the new students. Forget the bills, forget Charles’ health. Forget the fucking rainforest. Erik had a new worry to obsess over.

He was still awake, spinning scenarios of Charles leaving him over fights with David, when Charles returned to bed a couple of hours later, practically glowing with happiness.

“He’s incredible!” he grinned as he settled himself back under the sheets. “Erik, you wouldn’t believe the power he has in him. And he’s my son! I can sense it! I don’t know if it’s normal with parents and children or if it’s the telepathy, but I can feel this connection with him - I can’t even explain it!”

Erik pulled Charles close in spite of the heat and wrapped his arms around his waist, and as much as he wanted to whine about how much David hated him already, Erik knew better than to spoil this moment for Charles. Not yet, anyway.  “He’s lucky to have you,” he told him instead, and pressed a kiss to his collar bone.

“You’re not his evil stepfather and you’ll get along just fine, I know it,” said Charles. “He’s an angry young Jewish boy who grew up in post-war Europe and whose mother just died. You probably have more in common with him than I do.”

“But he’s your son.”

Charles smiled. “He’s my son.”

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Running Away, Coming Home (the links on a chain remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4172784) by [pearl_o](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearl_o/pseuds/pearl_o)




End file.
